Most data centers have bottleneck areas that impact application performance and service delivery to users. One of those bottlenecks could be poor I/O performance in a host or server, which usually results in increased response time and latency, as additional activity or application workload including transactions or file access is formed and queued. Particularly, in a host system having multiple processors, each processor can be executing multiple host applications, which frequently causes a large number of I/O commands from different processors to be serviced. In addition, the interrupts resulting from completion of those I/O commands need to be processed timely enough for each processor that has requested the I/O to be aware of the completions in order to proceed with its assigned applications. Without proper coordination, poor I/O performance in a multi-CPU system can cause significant time delay that would almost defeat the purpose of using multiple processors to expedite application or transaction processing.
Among existing multi-processor systems, there are various solutions to improve I/O performance, such as designating a particular processor out of the multiple processors for handling all interrupts arising from any I/O transactions. However, none of these solutions can achieve system-wide efficiency in minimizing time for processing interrupts in connection with I/O performance in multi-processor systems.